Opposition’s Long Bay idea not the negative gear portrayed by Labor

Editorial

October 28, 2026 — 4:01pm

The unravelling housing crisis confronting Sydney makes the proposal by NSW Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane to shut Long Bay prison and convert the prime government-owned coastal location into 12,000 new homes worth considering.

The Coalition looked at the site a decade ago when the then corrections minister David Elliott said that “prisoners should not have access to such prime Sydney real estate at the expense of taxpayers” and advocated the sale of the jail for housing.

His Coalition government failed to act. But 13 months ago, the opposition revisited the sale, and Sloane has relaunched the idea with the proposal to establish a Long Bay Delivery Authority to relocate the prison, inmates and staff to existing regional and metropolitan centres.

Sloane told the Urban Development Institute of Australia’s state conference on Wednesday that the aim was not to create luxury housing: “Young people are sick of hearing governments say housing plans are about delivering more homes for young people, only for those homes to end up being luxury apartments they can’t afford.”

Labor is vigorously opposing the sale.

Planning Minister Paul Scully labelled it a fantasy. “The reality is the idea of putting 12,000 homes on the site behind us would create an area of around three times the density of Green Square without any of the transport infrastructure. This doesn’t pass the most basic of planning tests,” he said.

The NSW government talks a lot about housing. It’s Premier Chris Minns’ signature policy. His rezoning reforms were aimed eventually at delivering 170,000 new homes. But, three years later, NSW lags long behind National Housing Accord targets.

The opposition’s rejuvenated Long Bay plan is an early glimpse of the March state election campaign, with the major parties playing tit-for-tat on housing policy in each other’s safe seats.

Labor proposes massive developments offering some 9400 new homes in Woollahra and Edgecliff, located in Sloane’s seat of Vaucluse, while the opposition’s Long Bay announcement has targeted Attorney General Michael Daley’s seat of Maroubra.

Scully is not wrong in pointing out the transport infrastructure problems particular to developing Long Bay.

However, the minister has apparently forgotten that long before the closure developed into a political arm-wrestle, an Infrastructure NSW report in 2014 identified a light rail extension from Kingsford to La Perouse, including a stop at Long Bay, to unlock potential land use. In 2020, the South East Sydney Transport Strategy recommended a metro line be investigated to La Perouse, although another metro is unlikely until Metro West is finished and the state’s balance sheet improves.

Sloane said that the Long Bay Delivery Authority would be set up within 100 days of the Coalition winning government. It would consider how best to relocate Long Bay’s 1200 prisoners and 1000 staff while retaining a city-based jail facility close enough for ease of access for families and the workforce.

The Coalition must answer the valid questions about accessibility, the rehoming of prisoners and how it would preserve heritage aspects of the 1909-built jail.

But such challenges are not insurmountable. The opposition’s proposal has merit and should not be dismissed out of hand.

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